A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of IndiaSewell, Robert
History
A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India
Sewell, Robert
Vijayanagar (Empire) -- History
It equally affected the fortunes of the Portuguese on the coast. Goa
rose and fell simultaneously with the rise and fall of the second
Vijayanagar dynasty; and necessarily so, considering that its entire
trade depended on Hindu support; for the king of Portugal was never
well disposed towards his hereditary enemies, the "Moors." This
is a point frequently left unnoticed by writers, on Portuguese
colonial history. The two most recent authors of works on the
subject, Mr. Danvers ("The Portuguese in India") and Mr. Whiteway
("The Rise of Portuguese Power in India"), pay very little attention
to the internal politics of the great country on the fringe alone
of which the Portuguese settled, and on the coast of which their
vessels came and went. Mr. Danvers devotes one short paragraph to
the battle of Raichur,[250] and another[251] to the destruction of
Vijayanagar. Mr. Whiteway does not even allude to the former event, and
concludes his history before arriving at the date of the latter. Yet
surely it is easy to see that the success or failure of maritime
trade on any given coast must depend on the conditions prevailing in
the empire for the supply of which that trade was established. When
Vijayanagar, with its grandeur, luxury, and love of display, its great
wealth and its enormous armies, was at the height of its power, the
foreign traders were eminently successful: when Vijayanagar fell,
and the city became desolate and depopulated, the foreign traders
had no market for their goods, and trade decayed. So that this great
Hindu victory at Raichur deserved a better fate than to be passed
over by the historians as if it had been an event of small importance.
The Events that followed the Battle.
Nuniz gives us in detail an account of the events that followed the
victory of Krishna Deva Raya, and considering that he wrote only about
fifteen years after their occurrence, we should do well to receive his
account as probably true in the main. Firishtah, perhaps naturally,
preserves a complete silence on the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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